Grammar can be fun!

I remember when I was younger, grammar used to be one dreadful lesson. All it consisted of was worksheets to fill out verbs, adverbs, nouns, etc in the labelled blanks.

Since I did not want the kids in my class to have the same experience, I asked my associate teacher what I can do. She gave me a great suggestion to guide my lesson. She referred me to their Creation Myths they were writing for Social Studies and told me to teach grammar in a way that it would be applicable immediately.

Hence after I taught them about how to use (1) quotations and add in (2) adverbs and (3) adjectives, I advised them to go over and revise their myths so that they could include what they learned.

(1) For quotations, I read a story, “The Flight of a Hummingbird” to demonstrate how the author shows various characters speaking. [It’s a really interesting and motivating story that you can share with your class. Here’s a link for the story in case you don’t get a hold of the book: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi5u7A9DRAc ]. They really liked the story because it was closely related to the theme of myths. Also, this story gave me the opportunity to teach them that you do not need to always start a quote with he/she said, but rather mix it up with other expressions such as yelled, whispered, chanted, told, replied, laughed, mumbled, etc.

(2) For adverbs, I first shared a video with the class with a really catchy song. I recommend you watch it; you might just be humming it yourself for the next few days! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWYmEICNgOQ&feature=related . It was really interesting to see that the students were still singing the song on Monday! Then, I gave examples of adverbs on the board by using sentences with names of students from the class so they would be more interested.

For example- An adverb can modify a verb: Nuriana was writing quickly. (How was she writing? Quickly)

(3) And lastly, for adjectives, I gave each table-group 1 object at a time for 5 minutes so that they could write down as many adjectives as possible in order to describe the object given. It worked well because the objects given were quite different from one another.

All in all, as I reflected back, I realized that grammar is quite essential to teach so that it enriches student’s writing. Grammar is a tough topic to engage students in; hence videos and short activities do help to get them interested. Also, most importantly, when students edit their own writing by using what they are taught [example: adverbs/adjectives/quotations] it becomes a much more authentic experience which will help them retain what they learned rather than in isolated cases which is often the structure in worksheets.

Hope you are doing well!